If the conversation about the end of the U.S. Postal Service sounds familiar, it's not just because we've heard variations of it since 1970, when the old Post Office Department became a separate business. It's also because the destruction of mail delivery closely parallels the wrecking of American passenger rail. Apparently the Congress has it in for quasi-public institutions with work forces composed disproportionately of African-Americans.
Passenger rail has always been a losing proposition; the money is in freight. But until the late 20th Century, as the price of using public assets -- tracks, switches, signals and the rest -- freight railroad companies were required to carry passengers at a loss. Then somehow this social compact broke down. Both railroads and their regulators started talking as if railroading were an ordinary commercial enterprise instead of a public utility. Ordinary for-profits aren't expected to maintain business lines at a loss. Indeed, to the extent they do so, they're considered incompetent. So the people making money from national railroad facilities were able to persuade Congress that they shouldn't have to bother maintaining passenger service. In other words, the railroads figured out how to shift their burden -- what had been a simple cost of doing business -- to the public. Voila: Amtrak.
Independent passenger rail was bound to be a financial failure, and it was. So year after year after year Congress has complained about Amtrak's losses and tried to reduce them by shrinking the system, by now it's small enough to drown in the proverbial bathtub. Little-noticed along the way is the fact that many of the jobs being lost belong to black people.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first black-led union recognized by the AFL, and probably the most powerful union dominated by African-Americans in the United States. Much of the foundation of the black middle class was laid on the decent wages and benefits and pensions fought for and won by that union. So whatever hurts Amtrak -- and these days, pretty much everything does -- also hurts the African-American community.
Now connect the dots to the Postal Service. Mail, like rail, is a public utility. (If you doubt that, take a look at the Constitution, where the Post Office rates a specific mention.) A group of companies -- the mailing houses and catalog producers -- get to use this public utility to make a private profit, and they're doing very well by that arrangement.
Once again, though, the price they were supposed to be paying for this benefit was to subsidize
service to individuals. So once again, someone re-conceived this public utility as an independent corporation subject only to the iron law of profit and loss. Now the profitable commercial service can continue on its merry way while the money-losing public service is forced to resort to the kind of cuts which predict -- if they don't actually cause -- an imminent visit to the scrapheap (or bathtub).
And once again, an outsized group of the fired employees are African-Americans, because the Post Office was an equal opportunity employer before the phrase had even been coined. So right in the middle of the Great Recession another pillar of the black middle class is knocked down.
There is an alternative to the current flood of crocodile tears over the death of written communication. We could return to the social compact that regarded mail service -- and rail service, for that matter -- as something to be paid for by the people who benefit from it most. That doesn't mean those of us who receive an occasional Saturday letter, or occasionally take the Metroliner -- it means the freight shippers. In the case of the Post Office, at least, the public has been subsidizing them instead of the other way around. End that particular piece of corporate welfare and see how many post offices can suddenly re-open.
Perhaps it's only a coincidence that these two agencies, staffed by black workers, have been asked to do the impossible and then punished for failing to manage it. But coincidences of this kind -- which permit imposition of exceptional harm on one group provided the primary purpose of the harm is making money -- are precisely what is meant by the term "institutional racism."
It isn't too late to remember that rail and mail are public utilities and to govern them accordingly. Otherwise, we're just echoing the words of an earlier Gilded Age, spoken by a railway man as he was canceling a mail train: "The public be damned!"
Linda E. Brooks Rix: We Paid Dead People Using Paper, Pencil and a Whole Lot of Spit
Rev. Al Sharpton: Diminishing Black Wealth
Daniel Burrus: It's Time to Transform the U.S. Postal Service
The Post Office should get into the money transfer, check cashing, and bill payment business. There are many low income people who cannot afford to have checking accounts that could be well served by the USPS. The German Post system provides a similar service including savings accounts. Of course the check cashing and payday loan industry would lobby against this and Congress would surely do their bidding.
a/
most neither want nor need home delivery - just as happy to collect from a 7/11 or gas station - an alliance?
b/ whats w/ the huge queues for trifling purchases - automate - as banks did w/ ATMS
c/ a stamp is 44c - gotta be kidding - who needs 1c change? - no such thing in oz - all is rounded to nearest 5c
d/ we gotta get over this urgency thing - 90% turn out to be not so urgent after all
Good job... you nailed it "coincidence" aka you've committed a Type I error...
This is a black and red issue not a black and white issue... Both agencies are heavily in the red when there is a sufficient amount of private companies or products in the black that would gladly take up the slack if these two institutions disappeared alleviating taxpayers and eliminating inefficiencies in the American economy.
I do agree that we should get rid of ALL subsidies as the are anti-competitive.
We people believe that the only cost of driving is the gas in their tank, they're going to chose to drive, especially for the convenience. Make them pay the full cost of driving up front, instead of via other taxes, and they'll reconsider.
Federal highway funds are paid by motorists every time they fill their tank, read the yellow sticker found on every legal gas pump denoting the tax you are paying per gallon.Some of the funds collected by the excise tax on gasoline are being used to develop alternative forms of transportation, so I guess the cycle continues, tax what is at hand to create something new. Blame the government for that one.
What public assets? Except for Conrail, which is extinct, and the main Amtrak line from Boston to Washington, which didn't exist at the time she is talking about, aren't all railroads privately owned?
Right on.
if they had to send it via FEDEX or UPS it would be at a greatly increased cost and in the USPS goes down your mail service will goe up in cost significantly and you may need to go to a central warehouse to pick it it and drop it off as well as pay a rental fee for the mailbox
rural people will really have to drive far
I do believe there is much racism in many decisions I am losthe to believe that is the driver with rail and postal service
I do not deny it could be a reason.
I fail to see direct evidence beyond pure greed like when the auto companies bought up the trolley services and rails and trashed them so people would buy cars
This has been proposed and tried before with private companies wanting to take over postal services--the fear being they would take the profitable routes leaving the government with the non-profitable routes--a partial privitization of select areas
The US was an industry leader in energy production and with cheap fuel, built an extensive highway infrastructure system that connected our vast country. Europe, which which is more congested, has high fuel costs, many borders and suffered through two World Wars that destroyed its industrial bas and infrastructure it was rail that became the dominate mode of transportation.
How long will Democrats continue to justify the MASSIVE amounts of taxpayer money they throw at Amtrack and the Post Office in return for their union support, dues "contributions" and votes??
SImilar to GM's sad story the Post Office is in the red 11 billion every year and 8 billion of that is retiree pensions and Health Care benefits. Private industry could turn Amtrack and the Post Office around, UPS and FedEx make a profit every day but it is VERY UNLIKELY they could do so with the current unions.
Obama bailed out GM not to save jobs but to save the UAW, its dues "contributions", political support and votes. Had Obama not bailed out GM a Chapter 11 bankruptcy judge would have been free to void GM's UAW contracts........... a crippling bow to an already shrinking union culture.
And by the way, when is our military going to start showing a profit?